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Coverage driven verification has a big advantage – you can write a single test, and let run it several times with random seeds. Each run will generate a slightly different scenario – depending on the nature of the constraints you provided. I’ve talked about the pros and cons of excessive use of coverage driven methods here and here. Anyway, sometimes you just want to take an existing test and quickly create a number of variants off of it to make a small regression suite (that you might even throw away later on). For example – you could have a basic test that does some CPU writes and then drives random frames. During configuration you write to a register that sets the FIFO level and you want to have 10 different tests, each writes a different value to this register.

Autodup is a neat utility can help you do that. What it does is stupidly simple, but it can still save you a bit of copy/paste headache.

Let’s see how it works. Here’s an excerpt from the test you want to duplicate (fifo_lvl.sv):

…
cpu_xactor.write_register(FIFO_LEVEL,30);
...

Now you want to have 10 different tests, each writes a different value to that register. No problem! Use the magic pattern:

To download Autodup simply click on the attachment below. After you download, please run %./autodup -help to get started, it's very easy. If you encounter any problems or bugs, please let us know so we can get it fixed for you.

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Comments

Hi Paddy, thanks for you question. I hope you tried out the script and found it useful. At this point we'd like to encourage people to try out the script and report bugs to us. If you'd like to get the source code drop me a line.Yaron

Hi Yaron, I have looked at the tool and I actually wonder why someone might need a script to generate a series of values? I would have thought that SystemVerilog already comes with such built in feature. AFAIK you could easily set up conditional constraints to achieve exactly what has been described in the article. Then if you want it to be more deterministic, why not use seed values to get the tests more directed?Daniel

Hi Daniel, thanks for your questions. Indeed, random generation + constraints + coverage is a wonderful way to generate a series of values (check out the special randc modifier). However, like I said in the beginning of the article - if you're using a directed testing approach (suitable for some system level scenarios) or if you want to create a "quick regression" suite - you normally have to duplicate code. This utility saves you the overhead of copy-pasting, renaming the files and potentially introducing typos or other errors.

Yaron,In some situation, this script can give a quick sweep as you want, if use constraint , it needs more code to transfer variable. The script can sweep not only variable but also "function" (any code), however it generate many testcases as possible. I have a question here, how many __AUTODUP does it support in a file? If I define 2 __AUTODUP, and each have 3 sweep points, will it generate 3X3 testcases finally?

Good question. Unfortunately at the moment you can use only one AUTODUP per source file. I will take this into consideration for next releases. Thanks for trying it out and thanks for your input! You may want to check out the other free utility to add nice endfunction and endtask labels automatically.